Chapter 11: What the Ledger Said

Lucan's POV

I did not sleep after she slept.

I lay on my side in her bed with one hand flat on the sheet beside her shoulder.

I watched the skin where the mark had been.

It was smooth and pink, with no line left on it.

Eight years of someone else's name, gone in one night.

My wolf lay quiet in my chest for the first time in five years, content, with its head on its paws.

I got up and dressed in the dark.

Tobias waited in the corridor with a bag over his shoulder.

"You smell like her," he said.

"Don't."

"I'm only saying it's not subtle." He fell into step beside me. "The car's at the back gate. Two guards, no insignia."

"Good."

"Are you going to tell her where you're going?"

"When I know what I'll find."

We drove down the mountain without lights.

I should say now how I came to sit at that table, since nobody else will.

Brock Hunnewell plays at the Blood Moon every year, and every year he loses a little more to me and laughs it off.

Last night he put a phone down on the felt, face up, with a photo on it.

A girl asleep on a bus, mouth open, hair stuck to her cheek.

"My mate," he said. "Ugliest thing you ever saw. I'll put her up against your pot."

The room laughed.

My wolf woke.

It woke all at once, after five years of nothing.

It stood up inside me and looked at her face, and it did not laugh.

It said: Mine.

I have never in my life played a worse hand on purpose.

I let him raise, and raise again, and I took his napkin when the cards fell my way.

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